Alluvio AppResponse Reviews

End User Experience Monitoring: conversations, protocols but first of all the web transaction analysis feature with waterfall capabilities is now a fundamental tool for our NOC/SOC team.

Any potential issue is now discovered by our NOC/SOC team before it impacts the end-user experience. We are currently monitoring the performance perceived by the end user accessing and using the strategic applications of our worldwide customers. Usually, a problem is analyzed from a variety of different viewpoints but never from the most important: the End User. Thanks to the Riverbed Steelcentral AppResponse technology our remote services are now focused on monitoring the End User "satisfaction" instead of watching only the infrastructure.

We are working to improve SAP transactions monitoring capabilities. This feature will give us a great differentiator to our monitoring and managed services.

1 year

No. As any monitoring tool, the deployment is a process and it never ends.

Absolutely none.

The 1200 and 2200 models are sufficient for any PMI. If you want to scale in terms of performances and features you have to consider the 3300.

The support we had as of now is excellent.

No, we didn't use any other NPM/APM solution before Riverbed, but we tested some competitors.

Again, the setup is easy but it has to be considered a never ending process as the infrastructure is, at the end, dynamic.

In house

AppDynamics, Fluke Networks

It's a great solution and we think it could be used in many different ways.

End-user experience monitoring for web and non-web applications at the user transaction level.

Simply moving the focus from the IT infrastructure components to the end user with the result that it drastically reduces the time spent on troubleshooting performance issue.

It's not able to monitor SAP transactions.

I've used it for two years.

Absolutely not and it's easy and fast. Within a few minutes you can see what you didn't see before.

No, we haven't gotten any problems so far.

No issues with the hardware/software, but the licensing did cause some issues.

Customer Service:

Good.

Technical Support:

Good.

No we didn't.

As I said before the initial set-up was simple and fast.

We implemented it in house.

We chose Riverbed for its complete solution portfolio that can help monitoring and solve performance issues.

Appliance passively monitors network traffic. Ability to group transactions, great charts and correlation capabilities. Excellent for strategic metrics and as a troubleshooting/analysis tool. Thresholds and trap generation. Excellent protocol analytics out-of-the-box. Traffic capture warehouse. Good integration with AppTransaction Xpert (transaction analysis like wireshark) and Wireshark. Publishes reports. Some data accessible though API - can be integrated with existing management systems.

I began using ARX in 2008. I use it frequently as an APM analytic tool.

I've found these appliances to be very stable

Although the Director provides some centralized management and RPM Dashboards provides some degree of integration, each appliance stands alone in collection and analytical ability. The appliances come in rather large sizes, but if you have a large enterprise and you're looking to bring data feeds in from several locations, it will likely have to be served on several appliances.

Opnet probes (AppResponse Xpert), now part of Riverbed, capture network traffic and calculate automatically many applicative and network KPI. AppResponse Xpert can trigger alerts on KPI.
Captured traffic can be analysed in AppTransaction Xpert to find network or applicative issues. AppTransaction Xpert is a powerfull tool permitting to focus quickly on problems and freeing the network engineer from fastidious and time consuming calculations / research.

Provides quick feedback on day to day applicative and network issues and permit to quickly break the tie between applicative teams suspecting the network and network teams suspecting servers or applications.

It avoids long time discussions by providing quick results and reduces dramatically time to repair / fix the issue.

4 years

Disks are heavily used for traffic capture and may break times to times but RAID feature avoids any production pause.

No

Customer Service:

Medium.

Technical Support:

Medium.

Very easy to use and gather value from the start. Easy to deploy on servers with little impact. Easier to gather information from the Server than from the Network Switch when there are multiple servers to combine for an application study.

Marketing is complex and not well understood, so often this product is not considered a good fit just for a surface look. Applications are getting more complex as there are islands of services that are combined to provide value to the customer. The response time delay is hidden within service calls that are being made. This family of tools provides the insight needed to know where that response delay is happening. It also provides insight as to the number of service calls that are being made. While each service call may be short, doing 1,000 of them, brings major delays to the overall response time. Finding where that delay is happening is key to improving the application. These tools provide that insight and provide the ability to show the total response time that is taking place. As a side note: Often I used the Capture side of the product more than the Analysis side of the product. The ability to do captures without having to use tcpdump on each system is very helpful. This ability takes the grunt work out of gathering the basic information that is required for deeper analysis.They (Opnet) also use Wireshark in their analysis phase and then add even more analysis for some deeper dive information. This is helpful for general analysis. Also some of their decodes have been helpful as well.

Use Cases: SOA brings a whole new meaning to the word distributed processing. Finding where work is really happening when an application is using SOA concepts is a challenge. In some cases, multiple traces are required as each trace reveals other servers and services that are engaged that were unknown to the original calling program of the SOA service. These are buried within the process of calling the first SOA service.

We use Alluvio AppResponse for monitoring websites with the help of web transaction details. It also provides good network performance and application manager visibility.

Alluvio AppResponse monitors the entire packet. It provides us with complete visibility of every packet, and we can get the average response time from the back-end server. If you want to get detailed monitoring, AppResponse is a great solution.

If Alluvio AppResponse reduces its cost, it will be more beneficial for customers to monitor their application and network performance. Additionally, integrating more features for application monitoring and focusing more on security threat monitoring would be even better.

I have been using Alluvio AppResponse for three to four years.

The solution is working fine, stability-wise. There are no glitches.

Enterprises mainly prefer AppResponse. It is costly for small and medium businesses. I rate its scalability a ten out of ten.

The technical support is good. There is a toll-free number. You need to call them and they will immediately assign you a technical engineer for your help.

We have used NETSCOUT and Gigamon Deep before. In comparison, Alluvio AppResponse provides very detailed monitoring.

The initial setup is straightforward. 

Alluvio AppResponse is available on a hardware version with VM and cloud.

Overall, I rate it a nine out of ten.